Vintage 1960 Claude Monet "Water Lilies" Art Plate

A vintage 1960 reproduction of Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1918. Professionally custom framed in dark coppery gold at 10" x 7.75".

Commentary accompanying the piece circa 1960:

 The idea of combining a group of water landscapes to form a complete and encompassing environment probably entered Monet's mind during (if not before) the exhibition of 1909, but lonely and discouraged after the death of his first wife in 1911, he all but ceased to paint. By the time the Venetian series was finished, a cataract had already begun to form over one eye. Before the war, came the death of his son Jean, whose wife, Blanche Hoschedé, became his assistant, painting companion, and protector. It was not she, however, but Clemenceau who finally roused him from mourning and inactivity: "I had talked to him," Monet reported to the Duc de Trévise later, "of the kind of decoration I should have liked to carry out in the past. He answered: 'It is superb, your project! You can still do it.'" Monet also received a letter from a lady admirer who spoke of a "room almost round, that you would decorate and that would be encircled by a beautiful horizon of water." His enthusiasm once rekindled, he planned a huge new studio which, despite wartime shortages, was completed by 1916 and outfitted with large canvases on rolling bases.

Two years later Monet was visited by René Gimpel and Georges Bernheim. They had heard rumors of "an immense and mysterious decoration" on which Monet was working in secret. To their surprise he willingly led them through the garden to the mural studio. On entering the glass-roofed interior they found themselves "before a strange artistic spectacle: a dozen canvases placed in a circle on the floor, one beside the other, all about two meters wide and one meter twenty high; a panorama made up of water and lilies, of light and sky. In that infinitude, water and sky have neither beginning nor end. We seem to be present at one of the first hours in the birth of the world. It is mysterious, poetic, delightfully unreal; the sensation is strange; it is a discomfort and a pleasure to see oneself surrounded by water on all sides.

"All day long I work on these canvases,' Monet said to us. I am brought one after the other. In the atmosphere, a color reappeared that I had found yesterday and sketched on one of the canvases. Quickly the picture is passed to me and I endeavor as far as possible to fix that vision definitively; but usually it disappears so rapidly that it has passed to make way for another color already introduced several days ago in another study that is placed before me almost instantly-and it continues like that all day?'"